Mass media of Illuminatia

The mass media of Illuminatia consist of a variety of printed and electronic means of communicating information and entertainment to a diverse audience, and play a fundamental role in Illuminatia's culture of educated public discourse and enlightened civil engagement.

The media in Illuminatia is a thriving industry thanks to the Illuminatian people's voracious cultural appetite for media consumption and the access to information, enlightenment, and entertainment that mass media provide here.

This intensity of media consumption and the high level of literacy that it suggests is a societal trait that without doubt was influenced by the selective nature of the original crew of the Lucidus mission. These highly-educated forefathers were the direct ancestors of Illuminatia's present-day population and irrefutably helped build a society of people who seek out mediums for discourse and cultural exposition.

The highly educated and civically-involved populace of Illuminatia stimulates a culture that is inclined to consume a high volume media, feeding a mass communications industry that in turn maintains ample resources to turn around and invest in an elaborate system of content creation and dissemination.

Newspapers form the bedrock of Illuminatia's system of mass media. Magazines and other printed periodicals also play an important cultural and information-dissemination role and maintain significant subscribership. Meanwhile, wireless broadcasting and telekinephotocasting lay a foundation for a completely divergent style of media consumption, enjoyed by nearly the entirety of the Illuminatian populace.

Deep background

Newspapers began establishing early in the history of human inhabitation in Illuminatia and newspaper publishers grew in size and proliferated in number as Illuminatia's population rapidly increased. Small scale wireless broadcasting began popping up soon after Illuminatia's first municipalities were established and wireless broadcasting further developed as Illuminatians' capacity for technology development and adoption expanded.

It wasn't long after the introduction of multiple newspapers in various cities that newspaper publishers began to establish independent local distribution syndicates to handle the circulation of these newspapers. These outfits picked up the role of circulation of the physical newspapers, which newspapers found to be too burdensome. These local circulation networks were later made into publicly-funded entities, each called a local periodicals distribution system, which cemented the role of these distribution organizations as independent common carriers of all newspapers, magazines, and other printed periodicals, irrespective of the publisher.

Thanks to the advent of wireless and telekinephotocast broadcasting and the expansion of the number of channels of real-time audio and visual content simultaneously available in any given location, the mass media audience in Illuminatia has experienced some fragmentation. However, unlike the high level of media fragmentation experienced in the early modern age of Earth, Illuminatian mass media has tended to maintain its most significant audiences around a core diet of mainstream outlets, with more specialized channels of electronic communication merely supplementing the core media regimen enjoyed by most Illuminatians.